38 % 
SHAPOUR. 
this reproach followed success, that half the Eastern conquerors, as 
the Bouide sultans, the house of Togrul Shah, Genghiz, Timur, the 
Othman race, See. have in their turns been represented as springing 
from the lowest origin; and a story, almost the same indeed as that 
attached to the birth of Cyrus, has been recorded of Artaxerxes, 
and forms a new point of resemblance in their history.* 
That, however, the father of Sapor was not a man of very obscure 
descent, may be inferred from the silence of Moses of Chorona, who in 
the ninth or tenth century appears as the partizan of the Arsacides; 
as well as from the positive assertion in the inscription*!* at Nakshi 
Rustam , that he was the son of a king ; an assertion which might have 
been safely made in his name in a distant age, but which would 
hardly have been hazarded by himself in a public and triumphal 
record, if its fallacy had been familiar to all his contemporaries. 
He assumed also in his own name, and that of his father, the divinity 
which had been attached to their Kings by the ancient Persians, and 
which was continued by the Parthian monarchs. The royalty how¬ 
ever claimed by Art a xerxes in the inscription, was certainly 
limited to his own native Persis, which in fact was always included in 
the dominions of the Parthian Kings ; though the immediate rule may 
have been resigned to a descendant of the Caianian family. The pro¬ 
vinces of the monarchy were administered by eighteen Satraps, to 
whom the Parthian Kings, like the Moguls, had gradually resigned 
almost all the power of the empire; and who, to justify in their nomi¬ 
nal superior, the title of the King of Kings, severally assumed the regal 
dignity themselves : as in the polity of modern Persia, according to 
Niebuhr,^ inferior officers are called Khans and Saltans , titles of 
* Mirkhond in Db Sacy, p. 275. Ancient Universal History, xi. 146. 
t De Sacy, p. SO, &c. wo? Ora 7r«7r«xou See Moses of Chorona:, quoted 
in De Sacy, p. 168. 
t Niebuhr, ii. p. 83. 
5 
